The influence of Shia clergymen

Shia clergy spread their message, from Iraq and Iran to Syria and Lebanon

CROSS-LEGGED on cushioned carpets, the latest intake of novices at a sparkling Shia seminary forsake their Koranic rhetoric for the view through curtained French windows at hills rolling over to Israel. Welcome to Lebanon's Shia hawza, country-club style. Vast mansions and religious colleges built by Lebanon's West African diamond merchants and exiles in Detroit stud the land that Hizbullah, Lebanon's Islamist Shia movement, took back from Israel five years ago, interspersed with portraits, strung from lamp-posts, of dead guerrillas.

The Najaf College for Islamic Studies, named after the Shias' holiest city 1,000km (620 miles) away in southern Iraq, is one of dozens of religious Shia colleges to sprout in Lebanese villages over the past decade. They pay pupils stipends of $60 a month, teach their own curricula and build up separate identities that put religion above nationality. Traditional heroes, such as Saladin, who conquered Jerusalem for Islam and whose Tabnin castle still towers above the Najaf College, are recast as Sunni butchers who overthrew the Arab world's last Shia state.

Before the civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, less than a third of Lebanese students went to private, mainly sectarian, schools. Now 60% do. The bankrupt state increasingly relies on party institutions and religious foundations to provide basic services. Lebanese look to their confessional leaders to provide work—in orphanages, hospitals, banks, football clubs and even at petrol stations. Patriarchs and muftis are political kingmakers.

Six decades of confessional rule and 15 years of displacement in sectarian wars have left Lebanon a patchwork of rival communities. The Taif accord of 1989, which ended the civil war, failed to heal the divisions and left most of the old commanders in charge. Sectarian factions operate like states within states, with multi-billion-dollar concerns. The youngest and most zealous, Hizbullah, inspects foreigners' passports and openly runs its own army, bucking a UN resolution last autumn that told it to disarm.

But outside pressure on Hizbullah to disarm has recently coincided with growing dissent among Shias themselves. Sparked by America's liberation of the hawza in Najaf itself, the historic nerve-centre of the world's 170m or so Shias, Lebanese Shias are re-examining their attitudes to clerical power. A representative of Najaf's spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, calls on Lebanon's clerics to apply his fatwa to abstain from political office and says that Lebanon's Shias should choose their own future without truckling to Iran, the foremost Shia state.

One of Lebanon's two main Shia parties, Amal, agrees. “We are with Sistani and his theory of government,” says Sheikh Abdel Emir Qabalan, Amal's spiritual leader, who looks to a revived Najaf to free Arabs from Persian clutches. Another member of Mr Qabalan's Higher Shia Council in Lebanon insists that Hizbullah should disarm as soon as Israel withdraws from the disputed Shebaa Farms, on the Israeli-Lebanese border.

But Hizbullah has so far turned a deaf ear to such advice. While iconic slogans of Syria's President Bashar Assad appear to have been put away, cardboard cut-outs of Iran's leaders loom large over southern Lebanon, and the party faithful still hail Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, as their Wali al-Faqih, or clergyman-commander. Western diplomats say that Iran gives Hizbullah some $200m a year.

For now, Iraq's Najaf is too poor and insecure to challenge the dominance of Iran's clerical centre, Qom. “Sistani is a pacifist who should have resisted the American occupation long ago,” sneers a Hizbullah propagandist. But even Hizbullah, some of whose officials say they would like to follow Mr Sistani's advice, shows signs of reconsidering. Over the past decade, it has watered down its slogans from “Islamic revolution in Lebanon” to “Islamic resistance” and most recently “Defence of the borders from another Israeli invasion”.

In return for international security guarantees, the movement which America's former deputy secretary-of-state, Richard Armitage, once called “the A-team of terrorists to al-Qaeda's B-team”, is talking about integrating itself into Lebanon's regular army and body politic. It long ago stopped boycotting Lebanese elections, and now controls 60% of the country's Shia municipalities. In Lebanon's next government, it might accept ministerial posts. “Hizbullah's military goals have to a large extent been achieved,” says a prominent Shia. “If we abolish our military section, Hizbullah can survive by [focusing] on politics and its social dimension.”

Hizbullah's leaders are not alone in dreaming of creating their own confessional state. Many Maronite Christians yearn for one, too. But the recent demonstrations in Beirut proved that more Lebanese want an end to the victor-or-vanquished mentality. “Lebanon is a blessing from God, a small experiment of 18 sects to teach the world how to live together,” says Sadr al-Din al-Sadr, son of the spiritual mentor of both Hizbullah and Amal. “If it fails here, it can work nowhere.”